The Mask Is Off

(Reprinted from the issue of December 11, 2003)

The
Bush administration has won a major
political victory: the biggest expansion of Medicare in the 38-year history
of that jewel of the Great Society. The details are complex; the cost will
be staggering  ultimately, trillions of dollars.

This is
not only a victory over the Democrats, but a triumph over any principled
conservatives who remain in the Republican Party. The GOP leadership in
Congress steamrollered those who have supported Bush in the hope and
belief that he stood for a return to limited and constitutional government.

President Bush, to
put it briefly, has finally removed his
conservative mask. As one critic observes, he doesnt even bother
using conservative rhetoric anymore. He has joined the free-for-all of
socialist entitlements, hoping to reap his reward in the 2004 election by
taking the senior vote from the Democrats who until now have virtually
owned it.

This may
be a sound political calculation, but it throws an odd light on all those
neoconservatives and nominal conservatives who have been praising Bush
for having the courage of his convictions. Just what convictions have they
been referring to?

Bush is a
winner. Give him that. But he has defeated not only his Democratic
opponents, but also those gullible Reagan Republicans who trusted him to
roll back the Leviathan state, or at least halt its growth. In just three
years he has already increased spending more than Bill Clinton managed to
do in eight years.

Rush
Limbaugh, having returned to the airwaves, accuses the Democrats of
hypocrisy. After all, Bush is doing what they say they want the federal
government to do, and theyre attacking him for it! Which proves
that all they really want is power. Their motives are purely partisan.

Limbaugh is right,
of course. But Bush and the Republicans are
equally partisan, and at least as cynical. The Medicare ploy is a simple
attempt to consolidate their power.

Is
anyone surprised? Well, yes. I am. I never thought Bush had any real
principles, but I underestimated his audacity. Just as I once thought his
father would be boxed in by his read my lips pledge never to
raise taxes, I assumed that the son would be inhibited by his conservative
posture and some respect for his political base. He seemed to have learned
something from his fathers defeat in 1992.

And no
doubt he did. But the lesson he learned was not the one I assumed
hed learned. He has apparently decided that he wont risk
alienating his core supporters by forsaking any attachment to limited
government.

Why?
Because the conservative movement has also forsaken that attachment. It
may not like expanding the welfare state, it may even grumble a bit about
the Medicare boondoggle, but it has been captivated by Bushs
foreign policy. For such conservatives, the war on Iraq has defined Bush as
a hero, once and for all. They arent unduly disturbed that the new
Medicare entitlements, particularly prescription drugs, will remain a
permanent albatross on the taxpayer long after they have served their
purpose of securing Bushs re-election. He is banking on their
shortsightedness.

As
president, Bush has yet to use the veto. No wonder federal spending has
run amok. Once upon a time, the presidency was the chief check on
Congress. The Tenth Amendment, limiting the U.S. government to its
constitutionally enumerated powers, was enforced by the presidential
veto. Even Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson sometimes vetoed
congressional legislation.

The
elder George Bush gained nothing by betraying his base; in fact it helped
lose him the presidency. The younger Bush evidently reckons that his base
wont even feel betrayed by his deviation from  indeed,
brazen violation of  its avowed principles. Yet even the Wall
Street Journal, a leading cheerleader for the Iraq war, notes in a
sour editorial that George W. Bush has never met a spending bill he
didnt like.
A Trusting Lot

What
accounts for Bushs deep emotional grip on conservatives? Part of
it is simply that liberals hate him. He is definitely not one of
them, no matter how much he enlarges government power. He
flaunts patriotic symbols and uses military might. He is a pro-Israel
Christian. He may not do much about abortion and sodomy, both of which
contemporary liberalism holds sacred (so to speak), but he expresses at
least mild disapproval of them, further enraging liberals. He has totally
effaced his northeastern roots with a Texan swagger.

Deep in
every conservative soul is the conviction that any man who drives liberals
nuts cant be all bad. Old-timers may recall how shrewdly Richard
Nixon and Spiro Agnew appealed to this sentiment.

Savvy
Republican politicians understand well  as Nixon and Agnew did
 that if you are verbally and symbolically conservative, you can get
away with being operationally liberal. Only a few connoisseurs, like
Howard Phillips, will notice the discrepancy.

Conservatives in
general are a trusting lot, so accustomed to
losing that they are grateful for even symbolic gestures. The elder Bush
was too Episcopalian, for lack of a better word, to make such gestures
with conviction; he took conservative support for granted to a degree that
was almost openly insulting, reasoning that conservative voters had
nowhere else to go. He forgot that they might just stay
home, as many of them did in 1992 and even in 2000.

His son
at least learned that he must try to generate enthusiasm and loyalty, and
he has succeeded in doing so. He doesnt want the next election to
be quite as close as the last one.
A Natural Development

But is
the old conservative philosophy totally passé now? Only a few
congressmen, like that genuine Texan Ron Paul, are still fighting for it.
Paul is warning that the Republican Party is close to making a total break
with real conservatism.

But
Republican conservatism has always been problematic. Even at its origins,
in the days of Lincoln, it was dedicated to the Whig agenda of
internal improvements that Jefferson had already
condemned as beyond the powers granted by the Constitution. In those days
it was the Democrats who resisted federal power, which grew riotously
after 1865, when the Republicans enjoyed political hegemony.

The two
parties began to reverse roles somewhat during the New Deal. But the
Republicans soon acquiesced in the national welfare state and global
interventionism. Conservatism made a partial resurgence with Barry
Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, but never renounced the entire legacy of
Franklin Roosevelt. Today neither party retains any Jeffersonian roots. One
might even say that the key to modern American history is the bipartisan
repudiation of the old Jeffersonian consensus.

Seen in
this light, George W. Bushs aggrandizement of the federal
government seems an entirely natural development.

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